The massacre of Jews in Stanisławów

On 22 August 1942 the German police carried out an operation in the ghetto of Stanisławów (Ivano-Frankivsk) which the perpetrators themselves called a “reprisal action” (Vergeltungsaktion). The pretext was the killing of a Ukrainian – according to some studies, a collaborator of the occupiers – whose death the Germans blamed on a Jew. In full view of the ghetto’s inhabitants, the chairman of the Judenrat, Mordechai Goldstein, and some twenty Jewish policemen were publicly hanged. More than a thousand people were shot. Some of the women and girls were raped by German policemen before they were killed.

The main studies speak of a thousand people shot, the execution of the Judenrat chairman and twenty Jewish policemen, and rapes before the executions. The figures must nevertheless be treated as approximate – they come from survivors’ testimonies and post-war investigations, not from German reports – and the sources differ on the details, including where the rapes took place. Stanisławów then lay in the District of Galicia of the General Government; after the war the city became part of Soviet Ukraine and in 1962 was renamed Ivano-Frankivsk.

The ghetto after the first deportations

By the summer of 1942 the Stanisławów ghetto was a shadow of a community which only a year earlier, together with refugees, had numbered several tens of thousands of people. Between 10,000 and 12,000 Jews had been killed on Bloody Sunday, 12 October 1941, and the survivors had been crammed into a ghetto that was sealed in December. On the night of 31 March to 1 April 1942 the police surrounded it and set houses on fire; thousands of people were then deported to the Bełżec extermination camp, and the ghetto’s boundaries were drawn tighter. Through the winter and spring the old, the sick and those without work papers were locked up in the so-called Rudolf Mill, where they died of hunger and typhus or were shot by officers of the Security Police.

The shootings and deportations in Stanisławów were organised by the local office of the Sicherheitspolizei, headed since the summer of 1941 by SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Krüger, with Oskar Brandt as his deputy. In July 1942 Krüger was informed from Lwów that transports to Bełżec would be suspended for a time. According to the German historian Dieter Pohl, he then closed the Rudolf Mill, which had served as a kind of transit camp, and from August Jews were shot regularly in the courtyard of the Security Police headquarters. By then Krüger himself had fallen into disgrace within his own service: a rival’s denunciation and an audit of his office’s accounts led to his recall in August 1942. The studies do not give the exact date on which he ceased to head the office.

The leadership of the Judenrat had changed as well. The lawyer Michał Lamm, who in the spring had refused to hand over the number of people demanded by the Germans, was probably shot in June or July 1942 in a nearby forest together with other council members, according to the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). His deputy, Mordechai Goldstein, succeeded him as chairman. Alongside the Judenrat, the ghetto had a Jewish police force (the Jewish Order Service), whose members the Germans forced to take part in round-ups and selections.

22 August

The course of the operation is known chiefly from survivors’ testimonies and from the records of post-war proceedings against members of the Stanisławów police. According to sources collected in the Israeli Pinkas Hakehillot (an encyclopaedia of Jewish communities), the Germans, claiming that a Ukrainian had been shot by a Jew, demanded that the Judenrat hand over a thousand people. The USHMM encyclopedia states that the operation was commanded by Walter Streege (Steege in some studies), the head of the German Protection Police (Schutzpolizei) in the city; other accounts attribute it to Krüger’s office. The two versions need not be mutually exclusive: in Stanisławów, as throughout Galicia, operations were usually carried out by the Security Police together with the German Order Police and members of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police.

Goldstein was to be the first, “symbolic” victim of the reprisal. He was hanged publicly beside the police headquarters. According to survivors’ accounts – among them that of Amalie Salsitz, whose memoirs are cited in Pinkas Hakehillot – the rope broke; the USHMM encyclopedia writes that it broke three times, after which the policemen kicked the condemned man and shot him. Together with him the Germans hanged some twenty Jewish policemen. According to one account, every tenth member of the Order Service was chosen; with their hands tied behind their backs, they were strung up from lamp posts. The bodies were left hanging in the street for two or three days – the accounts differ on this detail – as a warning to the ghetto’s inhabitants.

At the same time the police were seizing people throughout the ghetto. More than a thousand of them were shot; most studies name the Jewish cemetery, where Bloody Sunday had taken place in October 1941, as the execution site, while some accounts refer to the courtyard of the police headquarters. The gravest testimony concerns women. According to survivors’ accounts cited by the USHMM encyclopedia and by studies based on witness statements, German policemen raped some of the Jewish girls and women before taking them to the courtyard of the Security Police headquarters, where they were murdered. Popular accounts speak of rapes “at Gestapo headquarters”; the available studies make it impossible to establish either the exact place or the number of victims. Sexual violence against Jewish women was common in occupied Galicia, though long passed over in silence – the victims mostly did not survive, and the perpetrators did not speak of it.

After the action

The “reprisal action” was not an exception but one link in a chain that was meant to end in the murder of the entire community. After Goldstein’s death the Germans appointed a new chairman of the Judenrat; according to survivors, this was a man named Schönfeld, regarded as wholly obedient to the occupiers. According to Pohl, the Security Police shot several hundred people at a time in its courtyard on 28 August and then on 4, 9 and 26 September and 3 October 1942.

When the authorities in Lwów announced another train to Bełżec, Krüger’s deputy Oskar Brandt set the deportation for the first day of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, which in 1942 fell on 12 September. Some 11,000 people were still living in the ghetto at the time. According to Pohl and the USHMM encyclopedia, 3,000 to 4,000 of them were deported; according to other studies, about 5,000. Only doctors were exempted from among those seized. In September Jews from the surrounding small towns were also brought to Stanisławów and shot in the cemetery. In mid-September the same office liquidated the Jewish community of Kałusz (Kalush), which in July had still numbered more than 5,500 people.

Stanisławów was no exception in August 1942. In the same weeks in which the Germans were deporting the Jews of Warsaw to Treblinka during the Great Deportation, mass deportations to Bełżec began in Galicia, where new and larger gas chambers had been built that summer. From 10 to 23 August the so-called Great Action took place in the Lwów Ghetto: according to the studies, some 40,000–50,000 people were deported from it to Bełżec, and thousands were shot on the spot or in the Janowska camp. In August and September the deportations also reached further towns of the district. “Reprisal” executions such as the one in Stanisławów served terror within this system: they were meant to break the will to resist, strip people of their last trust in their own leaders and show that anyone – including those who, on the occupiers’ orders, served in the Judenrat and the police – could be killed at any moment.

Place in the war

By the end of 1942 only a small part of the former Jewish community was still alive in Stanisławów and its surroundings. On 15 October the ghetto was ravaged again, and in December the German Gendarmerie reported that, with the exception of a few doctors and pharmacists, all the Jews of the county had been “resettled” or moved into the Stanisławów ghetto. In January 1943 the police shot about a thousand people without work papers and deported another 1,500–2,000 to the Janowska camp in Lwów. On 22 February 1943 Brandt had the ghetto surrounded; over the following days its inhabitants were shot in the Jewish cemetery, and the Germans declared the city “free of Jews”. According to Dieter Pohl, over sixteen months the Stanisławów office organised the shooting of some 70,000 Jews from the whole region. When the Red Army entered the city in July 1944, about a hundred Stanisławów Jews had survived in hiding.

Most of the perpetrators escaped punishment or faced it only many years later. Krüger, held for a year in SS custody after his recall for betraying official secrets and for irregularities in accounting for looted property, lived in West Germany under his own name after the war. Only in 1968 did a jury court in Münster sentence him to life imprisonment for the murder of Jews; in the second half of the 1960s other members of the Stanisławów police and Gestapo were also tried before courts in Vienna and Salzburg. The massacre of 22 August 1942 – the execution of the Judenrat chairman and of the men who, on German orders, policed the ghetto – is one of the clearest illustrations that in the Nazi plan of extermination there was no position that could give Jews protection. Its memory has survived above all in the testimonies of the few survivors and in the memorial books of the Jews of Stanisławów.